Obsessions

"Talk to Her" and "Femme Fatale."

In a shiny Madrid clinic, Benigno (Javier Cámara), a male nurse who is one of the two heroes of Pedro Almodóvar's “Talk to Her,” washes the body of a patient named Alicia (Leonor Watling). Slowly, patiently, he wraps her in layers of bedclothes, lacing her up like a deluxe package. A beautiful young ballet dancer who was struck by a car, Alicia has been in a coma for four years, and Benigno talks to her as he works, figuring she needs the company. Before he became a nurse, he took care of his mother the same way. “You have to pay attention to women,” he says. A shy, slightly chubby young man, intelligent but unimaginative, he is trusted around the clinic, and trusted by Alicia's psychiatrist father, too, because he's a virgin—and, perhaps, a repressed homosexual—who would not take advantage of her. His gentleness, and the ritual washing of Alicia's limbs, suggests a devotion of religious intensity. The movie's second hero, Marco (Darío Grandinetti), who is an Argentine writer, meets a fierce, long-waisted female bullfighter named Lydia (Rosario Flores), and becomes her lover. Lydia is gored in the ring, and she, too, falls into a coma, but Marco doesn't talk to her as Benigno talks to Alicia. Marco's interest in Lydia is sexual and personal, and when she can't respond to him he goes silent. A man of sensibility, Marco weeps when he is reminded of time spent with an earlier love. In Almodóvar's previous film, “All About My Mother,” the men either died or had breast implants; they became “women,” and worked as hustlers. There seemed to be no way—not even a bad way—of being a man in Almodóvar's world. Now the director has found one: men can adore women. The two dissimilar men form a bond centered on their task.

Almodóvar's stories have always been improbable, even nutty, at the literal level but coherent and satisfying emotionally and poetically. Earlier in his career, in movies like “Law of Desire” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” he worked in super-bright colors—the shades of magazine graphics and department-store displays. A veteran of Madrid's gay cabaret scene and the city's funky comic-book culture, he relied on a fast, pop tempo and abrupt transitions, and he was drawn to extravagance of every kind. In “Women,” Carmen Maura set her bed on fire after her lover left her, and then, staring at the blaze in wonder, threw a lit cigarette into the flames. The redundant torch was the Almodóvar signature of excess. A bad-boy camp fabulist, he created moments that went over the top into blasphemy and scandal, but the flamboyant imagery and the hyperbolic performances were so funny that he didn't hurt anyone's feelings seriously. Almodóvar was something new in movies—a soulful erotic entertainer of surpassing generosity. His characters were drug-addicted nuns, transsexuals, homosexuals, vain hetero studs, jumpy, hot-tempered women. There were no normative emotions except longing and romantic obsession, and the pain of loyalty.

The friendship of two men meeting over the bodies of half-dead women is strange, to put it mildly, but this time Almodóvar draws us into his tale slowly, tenderly—he establishes the psychological props underneath the creepy situation, moving back in time. We see that Benigno, living in his mother's apartment, became obsessed with Alicia before her accident, when she was a ballet student rehearsing in an academy across the street. And, years earlier, Marco was devoted to a heroin-addicted woman whom he protected but finally couldn't save. There's still a fabulist at large in “Talk to Her,” but the attempt at psychological realism is new, and Almodóvar has brought an extraordinary calm to the surface of his work. The imagery is smooth and beautiful, the colors are soft-hued and blended. Past and present flow together; everything seems touched with a subdued and melancholy magic.

At the beginning of the movie, Benigno and Marco, who haven't yet met, sit side by side at a performance of Pina Bausch's ballet “Café Müller.” Onstage, two women bounce off the walls in blind anguish while a man rushes to and fro in front of them, moving chairs out of the way. Bausch's ballet is an independent work, but it seems to come straight from Almodóvar's unconscious, putting us in touch with extremes of isolation and dependency. In the clinic, Benigno gazes at the naked Alicia, who has a lusciously ripe figure. He seems eager only to serve her, to worship an ideal woman, but, after a while, we can't be sure—there may be a hint of sexual interest in his caressing attention. And Marco, like the man in the ballet, is drawn to a furiously self-dramatizing woman, the kind of woman Almodóvar has always loved. Rosario Flores has a Picasso face, with a long chin, a large, hatchet nose, and thick, unruly black hair. Dressed in her torera rig, she's an amazing creature, the most potent of Almodóvar's women. There's a touch of fantasy in both relationships. Almodóvar's point, I think, is that you can't have love without fable—that every love affair is an improbable narrative wrung from non-being and loneliness.

The story takes a startling turn, but Almodóvar prepares us for it by creating an old silent film that Benigno says he has seen. In this movie within the movie, a fervent lover drinks his partner's diet medicine and shrinks to the size of a homunculus. At night, when his beloved is sleeping, the eager little man staggers across her breasts and then enters the giant portals of her vagina, which are planted with ample sculpted shrubs all around, and disappears, never to emerge again. There are echoes of paranoid-Surrealist episodes from Buñuel and Fellini in this, and most of us will be tempted to see the film as Benigno's dream. One way of looking at “Talk to Her,” I suppose, is as a story shaped by a homosexual's longing for women, a longing that can be expressed only as irony or as nightmare. In the clinic, the women don't move or speak; they are immobilized and entirely manageable. Wheeled out to lie in the sun, on adjacent chaises, Alicia and Lydia face each other wearing dark glasses and robes, like two fashionable rich ladies; they could be mannequins, women reconfigured as art—an image that is both funny and sinister. Some viewers may feel that the movie teeters on the edge of a disastrous malevolence, but I don't think it should be taken that way. It should be taken, rather, as a gay director's admission of emotional avidity and physical fear. At the end of the movie, Pina Bausch's company is onstage again, this time doing a bucolic dance in which men and women hold each other tightly. Using the two ballets as a frame, the film shifts from isolation and madness to romantic wholeness. Certainly, Almodóvar believes in the reality of romantic love—he believes in it as much as any movie director, straight or gay, ever has.

Brian De Palma's “Femme Fatale” is elegant nonsense. For some years, it's been clear that De Palma's work has lost the jolting intellectual energy and wit of his “Carrie” and “Dressed to Kill” days, and in “Femme Fatale” the Master is just diddling. The movie, an erotic thriller set in Paris, hangs together only because De Palma's repeated use of certain locations and visual motifs provides a nominal consistency. But it doesn't hang together in any way that matters. This is not to say that many of us will not be ravished by an early sequence, set at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, in which a naughty girl posing as a photographer (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) seduces a model dressed only in diamonds arranged on her body in snake patterns. You heard me. The two of them make out behind the shaded glass panels of a chic toilet stall, steaming up the joint. At its best, and also at its worst, the movie employs the sleek visual design of high-schlock Euro fashion ads. Antonio Banderas, very much at home in schlock, high or low, puts in a casual appearance as a happy-go-lucky photographer thrown into the middle of an intrigue he never understands. Banderas himself seems lost, except for a brief episode in which he pretends, with lovely tact, to be a gay fussbudget looking for a missing floppy disk—an homage, perhaps, to the free-spirited movies he once made back in Madrid, with Pedro Almodóvar. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.